Johann Ernst Gerhard the Elder (1621-1668) is not a household name. Like most scholars (present reader excluded) his work aged rapidly and was of limited interest to the next generation – and of none to the following. Gerhard’s life and work as an orientalist are nonetheless instructive. At the end of the seventeenth century the Duke of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg purchased the Gerhardina collection, incorporating the library and manuscript nachlass, of Gerhard’s father, the prominent Lutheran theologian Johann Gerhard (1582-1637), as well as Johann Ernst Gerhard’s papers. This massive collection includes Johann Ernst Gerhard’s library, heavily annotated dissertations and disputations, lecture notes, travel diaries, and his extensive correspondence. All these allow us an unusually close look at a seventeenth-century scholar at work as well as shedding light on the intellectual and social contexts within which his scholarship evolved. In a sense Johann Ernst Gerhard is an ideal “minor thinker” – typical enough of his day to be instructive, yet intelligent enough to be interesting. The aim of this project is to produce a biography, which, using this rich collection, will attempt to reconstruct and understand the life and work of this forgotten orientalist. In the meantime, I would like to use this blog not so much to post “preliminary findings” as to occasionally upload and discuss single sources, which may be of interest to those concerned with early modern scholarship and to all who have a weakness for occasional Neo-Latin gossip from the seventeenth-century Republic of Letters.
The blog can be found here